low end linux

>> http://www.ltsp.org/
>>
>
> I am sure that would work
> but the logistics would be too difficult...
>
> the machines will be spread out over a 4 story office building.
>
> Either a wired or a wireless setup would be impractical

>>I'm not the file system expert, but I know it was rejected by our
>>company evaluators. The problems they were concerned with was the
>>demonstrated lack of recoverability in certain conditions. I've also
>>heard much anecdotal evidence from others. I've seen/heard reports
>>that XFS is better in that regard. On the other hand, my home systems
>>are mainly ext3, and I can't say that I've run into problems with it.

>Yes, ext3 can be recovered, say goodbye to data on a corrupted
>reiserfs3 FS.

_real_ horror stories about that.

>OTOH reiserfs resize grow and shrink work reliably, and the FS has
>very good tolerance for unexpected powerfail (no UPS here), but no
>data loss due to powerfail aver several years.

Resize isn't a requirement here - we basically allocate fixed sized
partitions, and if that no longer works, it's a backup, re-partition
and restore (or simply move to another disk/partition/server). As for
UPS, policy says servers have UPS, and critical stuff has backup
generators that should (yeah, I know) be up to speed within four
minutes max. UPS with an automatic shutdown capability isn't that
big of an expense - my last (new) UPS at home was ~US$120 for 1KVA
and it's running five systems on a master/slave control. Even the
old UPC (obtained by dumpster-diving with a cost of new batteries
and a serial cable) was pretty cheap insurance.

>I switched to reiserfs3 back years ago when ext3 was locking up on a
>box here, no problems with it since[1], and I like the replay on
>mount concept far better than ext3's slow fsck.

Uptime doesn't show it because of new kernels, but I try to keep
the home systems running all the time. At work, we try to avoid
power downs, and there is some protection because the workstations
(which don't have a UPS) are all network file systems on servers
that most definately are on UPS (as are the routers and switches).

>XFS is supposed to be very good on quality hardware, but it
>requires UPS for reliability as much FS 'state' is held in memory
>to gain the performance. I've not used it though.

We learned our lesson over 20 years ago when the city gave us a
demonstration of "back-hoe" fade of supposedly redundent 13 KV
powerlines. The sparks were entertaining (and no one was hurt)
but power went up/down/up/down fairly rapidly, and we not only
lost a shed-load of Sun (Sony and Phillips) monitors, but also
lost a number of systems that apparently didn't stop trying to
write to disk merely because power was failing. We had some
systems take over ten hours to fsck a disk, and some of the servers
had a many as six (SCSI) disks hanging off a single controller.
We were lucky, because the tapes were good. It just took a long
time to get everything running again. Oh, and the big Caterpillar
diesel generator... nah, I'm sure you can guess about that.

Old guy

From: philo on 26 Jan 2010 18:33
Jasen Betts wrote:> On 2010-01-24, philo <philo(a)privacy.net> wrote:
>
>>> http://www.ltsp.org/
>>>
>> I am sure that would work
>> but the logistics would be too difficult...
>>
>> the machines will be spread out over a 4 story office building.
>>
>> Either a wired or a wireless setup would be impractical
>
> are they going to surf the net using dialup?
>
> LTSP works well.
>
>

No dialup

anyway I brought in two machines today

and I'll see how it goes

From: Tomas Pedersen on 28 Jan 2010 11:04
On Sun, 24 Jan 2010 10:39:11 -0600, philo wrote:>
> the machines will be spread out over a 4 story office building.
>
> Either a wired or a wireless setup would be impractical

How do you get them on the internet if they are not connected in a LAN?